It's not easy, living in the heart of New England being a diehard New York sports fan. In baseball season, my Yankees' spirit gets bashed left and right by the Red Sox fans who take delight in punching my buttons -- in school and at home (and yes, all in good fun). Last night, I was one of only a few Giants fans in a party full of Patriots fans, and I was the lone New York cheerleader in my house when we came home to watch the second half. My sons went to bed depressed.

I was fine.

:)

I expect some tired faces today in class with my students, most of whom are rabid Patriots' fans, and I will be sure to just tweak the young fans just enough ... but I won't wear my Giants' shirt today to school. Sometimes, you have to pull back. But I just might wear my tie ...

Peace (in the victory),
Kevin

I have some writing scattered about the web today:

• I wrote a piece for the Nerdy Book Club. The piece uses some invented words from my students that would be appropriate descriptions of nerdy book lovers.
• I have two graphic novels reviews up live at the Graphic Classroom. One is a review for a science-based text called How Do We Stay on Earth. (hint: gravity). The other is about Martin Luther King Jr. called I See the Promised Land. It’s hard to describe but it is an interesting mash-up text.
• And I have been contributing blog posts to the National Writing Project’s Digital Is site in preparation for the Feb. 1 Digital Learning Day initiative. I posted my comic that looks at data from my students on how they use technology.

Peace (in sharing),
Kevin

 

(link to stats)

Like many bloggers, I am curious about who comes knocking at my door from time to time. So, at the end of the year, I like to take a peek at the data from my blog traffic. Maybe I do it to reinforce the idea that I even have visitors, or to gauge some impact of my writing in a small sliver of the world. Mostly, though, I have become interested in data and how to interpret it.

So, here is the big picture: My blog had 27,568 hits last year (of which 20,941 were unique visitors, meaning not folks who keep coming back — but I like those folks who do, of course. ) Other data elements are interesting to me, but maybe not for you. Still, here is a collection of analytics related to my blog in 2011. The screenshots come from this blog, and my site on Vimeo (for video sharing), and from Feedburner.

The post with the most hits? Nothing to do with education. Instead, it was my collection of short Twitter stories around love that I published for Valentine’s Day. Go figure!

I did notice that most of my visitors come via my friends’ Stacey and Ruth’s blog, Two Writing Teachers. I guess I owe them …
If you come visiting here now and then, I want to thank you.

Peace (in the data stream),
Kevin

I saw this in my RSS feed yesterday from friend Larry Ferlazzo. It’s a writing activity perfectly suited to Twitter in which teachers are asked to write a six word essay that captures the essence of teaching. If you are on Twitter, use the #6wordessay hashtag. Larry is collecting some of the responses via Storify. The whole project evolved from a project that Michelle Rhee is doing with young people.

Here is what I came up with:

What’s yours?

Peace (in the mini-essay),
Kevin

From The Springfield Republican
Before I was a teacher, I was a newspaper reporter. It seems like a lifetime ago, that world of journalism, but every now and then, the past peeps out at me. Recently, the art teacher at my school handed me a photocopied newspaper article and told me to look at the story that focused on our school’s art program. She pointed to the reporter’s name. It was me.

To be honest, I don’t remember writing the article. I was often writing two, sometimes three, news articles each day, and my memory of most of the specific stories are a blur. But I do remember when I briefly was the reporter covering the town in which my school is located. The community was much smaller then and has grown considerably. I remember scratching around for news. I often went to the schools to focus in on students (one of the reasons I became a teacher was that I was inspired by the work I was seeing in classroom when I was an education reporter).

It’s interesting to find myself drawn back to that chapter in my life. I may not remember the story I wrote, or the kids I focused on, but it is fascinating to think of the connections that are drawn between that life and this life. The newspaper article is like a little echo of those times when I was a writer, every single day.

Peace (in the news from the past),
Kevin

You know how sometimes one topic suddenly veers off into this completely separate tangent in the classroom, and you just have to go with it for a while? We are nearing the end of reading The Watsons Go to Birmingham, and there is a scene where the main character almost dies in a whirlpool (only to be saved by a vision of his younger sister and the rescue by his older brother). I just casually asked if anyone had ever had a brush with water that they remembered.

Hands shot up. You would think I was in the room with near-ghosts waiting to tell their stories of how a river, or a pool, or the ocean had tried to grab life away from them. We had stories of riptides, and currents, and scary pool incidents. While it was interesting to hear all of the narratives, it also reminded me of how dangerous water can be.

Finally, after almost 20 minutes of this kind of storytelling, one of the students looked at my co-teacher and I and asked: What about you?

My colleague told a story of how he almost drowned in his pool when he came up for air and sucked in a mouth of clorine, and couldn’t breathe. I related the story of how I slipped under the ice in the river and how my older brother saved me by yanking me onto shore (just like the character in Watsons,  I realized).

One year, during 24-Comic, I wrote a graphic story of those events.

(read the rest of the story)

I didn’t mind the way our conversations moved around, away from the topic, because those stories demonstrated the power of memory (and possibly, the failure of memory, too, as no doubt some of the stories were exaggerated a bit), and you can be sure that every student connected with the character in Watsons.

Peace (in the moment),
Kevin

We, The Pirates

The world reverted to blank canvas today;
I speak here only of the world
as it had become
so that we can wonder about the world
as it has been;

So, Pa, is this what you wanted
when you sought to close the gates
to keep the ragged troops at bay?
We stare into their eyes and see
… only us, staring back.

So, Pa, we are the pirates aboard this ship
and you seek to run the tanker aground
in order to save the gold doubloons in the captain’s pocket,
never understanding that the real treasure
is in the sails that catch the wind of the seas
that float us forward into the unknown worlds.

The world reverted to blank canvas today, Pa,
but we still pulled out our pens, and pencils, and crayons, and keyboards,
and envisioned the way the world might be
if the doors were left open to creativity and chance.

More about SOPA and the efforts to either stop or at least modify it is here.

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

Peace (in the protest),
Kevin